Social / Organizational Network Analysis: Bit of History

The works of Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies in the late 1800’s were the early precursors of social networks, making early classifications and defining the notion of a social group, setting the scene up for the exploration of social networks. At the turn of the 20th century, Georg Simmel, introduced some of the most common social network notions such as dyad & triads, distances and network size (more of this in the next post) into the field, allowing formal terminology to be constructed and standardized.

In the 1930’s, Jacob Moreno, a prominent social scientist at the time, extended these insights through development of the sociogram, which is basically a diagram of points and lines used to represent relations among persons. Moreno first used them to uncover asymmetry and reciprocity in friendship choices, identification of social leaders and 'isolates', and to map chains of indirect connection within social circles.

Later on, other social scientists and mathematicians built on these principles and ideas to investigate the ways in which people developed friendships and obtained jobs. A group of Harvard social scientist then translated these concepts and inserted the notion of ‘social role’ into mathematical form, which allowed them to be quantifiably measured and modeled.

Near the latter half of the century, SNA had become a respected technique in the social sciences allowing sociologist, psychologist, mathematicians, physical scientist and management academics to successfully chart and map out the informal relationships of groups, with quantifiable measurements of influence, power, connectedness and communication patterns.

This relatively nascent field has been further pushed it into the limelight, as the current trends of social networks, social media and predictive analytics strongly advocate the need for a sociological tool that can help us assist our understanding of the relationships we all hold and possess.